Medical Answering Service, Upgraded
Traditional answering services take messages. DrHouse uses AI to triage patients, connects them with a physician when needed, and sends documentation back to your practice.
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AI-assisted triage routes every after-hours call by your rules
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MDs and DOs treat and prescribe, no message or callback needed
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Follow-ups and chart notes return to your practice
No setup fees and no cost to your practice
Built for Practices Like Yours
Simple to launch. Easy to control. Cancel anytime.
DrHouse provides after-hours care for non-emergency conditions and supports your practice as an extension of your existing workflow. DrHouse provides physician-led after-hours care that includes AI-assisted call intake, and is not a general medical answering, reception, or appointment-scheduling service. Care is delivered by licensed, board-certified physicians and is subject to physician judgment, patient eligibility, and applicable state laws and regulations. Treatment decisions, prescriptions, and visit availability may vary based on clinical appropriateness and state-specific requirements. DrHouse does not prescribe controlled substances.
How Does It Work
Extend your practice with after-hours, overflow, and vacation coverage, while keeping full control of patient care.
Accepted Insurances
A medical answering service takes the message. DrHouse takes care of the patient.
Your answering service takes a message. We take care of the patient.
The Service
When a practice signs up for a medical answering service, it is buying coverage of the phone, not coverage of the patient. That distinction sounds small and turns out to be everything.
After your office closes, your line forwards to a call center. A friendly operator answers in your name, writes down who is calling and what is wrong, and then follows your standing instructions: hold the message until morning, page whoever is on call, or, when something sounds urgent, put the caller through to your on-call physician.
It is a genuine service that solves a genuine problem, because nobody wants a sick patient to reach a dead line at 10pm. But the person on the other end is not a clinician, and that one fact shapes everything that follows.
One aside, because the search results muddy it. This page is about answering a medical practice’s phones. It has nothing to do with the Medicaid transportation programs that happen to share a similar name in a few states.
Where the call actually ends
Follow a single after-hours call all the way through and the limit becomes clear. The phone rings, the operator picks up, the symptoms get written down, and then the message has to land somewhere.
In practice it lands in one of two places. It joins a queue for the morning, or it is routed to a doctor at home who is now trying to help from a secondhand account of symptoms they cannot see. Either way the visit has not happened. The call has been documented and the patient has been heard, but the medicine, the actual reason they called, still waits.
Everything good about an answering service holds right up to this point. Everything frustrating about it begins here.
Night Shift
Why a message is not enough after hours
A message is a useful thing during office hours. It tells the front desk who to call back and why, and the team clears it within the hour.
After hours the same message changes character, because the calls coming in are rarely about scheduling. They are people who feel genuinely unwell and were hoping to be helped tonight.
Handing them a callback slip does not meet that moment. It postpones it, usually onto your on-call physician at an unkind hour, or onto your staff first thing the next day.
A typical call
Picture an ordinary weeknight. A parent calls around eleven because their toddler has been tugging at one ear and running a fever for a few hours, and they cannot tell whether to wait it out or head for the emergency room.
With an answering service the operator is warm and efficient: details taken, reassurance offered, a promise that someone will follow up or that the office opens at eight. Then the night stalls. The message waits in the queue, or the on-call doctor is woken to give advice they cannot turn into an actual prescription over the phone.
The parent is left weighing a four-figure ER trip against riding out what is most likely a routine ear infection. The call was handled with real care. The child still has not been treated.
The same call, handled
Send that identical call to DrHouse and the night resolves instead of stalling. Intake captures the history, and within minutes the parent is in a video visit with a licensed physician rather than waiting on a callback.
The doctor looks the child over, recognizes the ear infection, and where it is appropriate sends an antibiotic to a 24-hour pharmacy before the call ends.
The family is treated and back in bed. No one was paged, and in the morning your team opens a finished visit note instead of a slip to chase.
The difference has nothing to do with how kind the operator was. It is that one path can treat a child and the other can only record that the child is sick.
The eight o’clock pile
Deferral has a cost, and it arrives the next morning. Every overnight message that was logged instead of resolved becomes a small job for your front desk: a callback to make, an appointment to squeeze in, a worried parent to settle.
By one practice’s account, staff were losing roughly ninety minutes a day just working through answering-service messages, time taken straight from the patients standing at the counter. A service that only takes messages does not lighten your morning. It quietly schedules your morning’s first scramble.
The Real Cost
How the meter works
Most medical answering services bill for time, the way a taxi does. The standard is per minute, commonly somewhere between roughly a dollar and two and a quarter for every minute an operator spends on your calls.
Some charge per call instead, often a dollar to three apiece no matter the length, and others sell a monthly block of minutes that runs from a few hundred dollars to well past a thousand depending on volume, with overage charges waiting beyond the cap.
Nights and weekends usually cost more, since someone has to staff the slow hours. Whatever the structure, you are paying for talk time, including all the calls that never really needed a person.
The fees you do not see at first
The headline rate is rarely the real one. The classic surprise is the patch fee. When the service connects a caller to your on-call doctor, its line stays occupied, so it bills you for that time.
Read that slowly: you are paying the answering service for the minutes it spends waking up your own physician.
Around that sit setup fees, holiday surcharges, scripting charges, and fees to book into certain calendars. The clean per-minute number on the sales page has a way of growing by the time it reaches your statement.
The costs no invoice shows
The bill is the easy part to see. Harder to see, and usually larger, are the costs nobody itemizes. The ninety minutes of morning cleanup. The slow burnout of a physician woken three nights a week to work for free in the dark.
The patient who could not wait, drove themselves to urgent care, and quietly took their next several visits with them. None of that prints as a line item, and all of it is money and goodwill walking out of the practice. A service that can only relay a message has no way to stop any of it.
How DrHouse compares
Set against all of that, the DrHouse model is simple to state, and worth stating precisely. Practices do not pay DrHouse for after-hours coverage. There are no setup fees, no per-call charges, and no subscription.
Care is billed through the patient’s insurance when treatment is provided, the same way an in-office visit is billed. So the comparison is not really between a cheaper answering service and a pricier one.
It is between paying by the minute for your practice to take a message, and a model where your practice pays nothing and the patient is actually treated. The next tab lays out exactly how that works.
The DrHouse Way
What the DrHouse way actually is
DrHouse offers complete after-hours physician coverage for your practice. When your office is closed, your patients reach a licensed physician who can evaluate, diagnose, treat, and prescribe over video, the kind of care they would expect from an in-office visit, delivered in the moment rather than deferred to the morning.
It is not a call center attached to your phone line. It is a clinical team that picks up where your day leaves off.
How it works for your practice
The setup mirrors what you already do with after-hours calls, with one change at the end. Your existing number forwards to DrHouse after hours.
AI-assisted intake gathers the patient’s history and routes the call by rules you set: which cases get treated, which come back to you, which get escalated.
A physician then carries out the visit, sends any prescription to the patient’s pharmacy, and documents everything.
By the next business day a full visit note is back with your team, and any follow-up routes to you. Your patients never learn a new number, and your staff never install a thing.
Who treats your patients
Care is delivered by licensed, board-certified MDs and DOs credentialed by DRH Medical Group, with experience across primary care, urgent care, and telehealth. They work within the scope and protocols you define, so the care your patients receive after hours reflects the standards they receive from you.
Because every visit is documented and returned to your team, you are never in the dark about what happened overnight.
Your patients stay your patients
DrHouse is built to extend your practice, not to compete with it.
Patients remain attributed to you. There is no marketing to them and no attempt to pull them into another network. Follow-ups, ongoing care, and long-term management all route back to your team.
The relationship you have built stays intact, and your patients simply experience your practice as one that looks after them even after the lights are off.
What it costs your practice, and what it costs the patient
This part is worth saying plainly, because it is easy to oversimplify. Practices do not pay DrHouse for after-hours coverage. There are no setup fees, no per-call charges, and no subscription.
Care is billed through the patient’s insurance when treatment is provided, exactly as an office visit would be. So your practice carries no cost and no financial risk, while patients are billed for the care they receive the same way they are for any visit.
The benefit to your practice is real, and the model is honest once it is laid out: you pay nothing, the patient pays for their care through insurance.
Getting started
Once your after-hours calls forward to DrHouse and your routing rules are set, most practices are ready within about half an hour, with no IT project and no change to how patients reach you.
You can adjust the rules whenever your needs change, and you keep control of scope the entire time.
The Choice
When an answering service is enough
It is worth being fair about where an answering service genuinely shines. If what you need is general phone coverage, a warm voice for daytime overflow, appointment booking, or simply making sure nothing rings out to voicemail, it does that job well, and DrHouse is not trying to take it from you. Plenty of practices should keep one.
The question here is deliberately narrow, and only about the clinical calls that come after hours: when a patient is unwell at night, is a message really the most you want to offer them?
When you need a physician
For most primary care, family medicine, and internal medicine practices, a large share of after-hours calls are not administrative at all.
They are patients with problems a doctor could settle in a short video visit, the infections, the flare-ups, the “is this serious enough for the ER” questions that genuinely have an answer. For those calls, a service that can only record the complaint is the wrong instrument.
That is the slot DrHouse is built for, and it sits comfortably beside whatever you already use for the routine, administrative side.
HIPAA and AI, briefly
Two questions come up every time, so here they are without the hedging. On HIPAA, anything that touches patient information has to protect it, and DrHouse handles that information as the treating provider under HIPAA-compliant practices, not as a middleman passing notes around.
On AI, the newer automated answering services can capture and route messages faster and more cheaply than a human switchboard, which is a real step up from the old model, but it is still a faster way to take a message.
DrHouse uses AI for the intake too, and then adds the part automation cannot, a licensed physician who treats the patient on the call.
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